“KINGS, COLUMBIA, AND THE CROWN: THE UNIVERSITY AND ANGLO-AMERICAN RELATIONS 1754 – 2003” WITH RAY RAYMOND
15 September 2003
Dr. Raymond explored the University's important role in shaping the Anglo-American relationship by examining the contributions of a number of its most distinguished alumni including John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dr. Raymond's presentation, as it places in a historical and political perspective the year's celebrations, thus serves as an ante-premiere of Columbia's inauguration of the 250th celebrations that takes place in mid-October. Dr. Raymond was introduced by Dr. John Jay Iselin, President of the Marconi Foundation, former President of Cooper Union and WNET, and Marshall Scholar.
Ray Raymond was educated at the University of Dublin, the University of Kansas and Yale University. He holds degrees in modern history, US government and politics and public policy. He is political officer of the British Consulate General, New York; Executive Director of the City Fellowships in Financial Services and Executive Secretary of the New York Marshall Selection Committee. Dr. Raymond also teaches comparative politics and international relations at the US Military Academy, West Point, where he is the only non-American civilian ever appointed to the faculty. He has written and lectured widely on Anglo-American relations and international terrorism at major universities throughout the Northeastern US.
Dr. Raymond has founded or co-founded six fellowship or scholarship programs designed to strengthen UK-US relations in fields including financial services, national security studies, public policy and pediatric medicine.
For his contribution to Anglo-American relations, Dr. Raymond was honored by Her Majesty the Queen in 2000 and was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Manufactures. He has received several other awards for public service. These include awards from the US Military Academy, West Point; Lincoln University, Pennsylvania; the US National Park Service; the Royal College of Defence Studies, and Childrens Hospital of Pittsburgh.
“INTELLECTUALS, PROPERTY, AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THE AGE OF CORPORATE MEDIA” WITH JAMES SCHAMUS
8 October 2003
This presentation was an informal discussion on the ways in which the continuing consolidation of market share and political power into the hands of a small number of multinational corporations affects the life of the mind in contemporary western culture.
James Schamus , who received his Ph.D. in English from U.C. Berkeley this year, is Professor in Columbia University's School of the Arts, and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, producer, and film executive. His long collaboration as writer and producer for Ang Lee has resulted in eight films, including “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “The Ice Storm,” “The Wedding Banquet,” and “The Hulk.” As co-president of Focus Features, Schamus oversees the finance, production, and distribution of numerous films, including Oscar winner, “The Pianist.” Schamus has also produced or executive produced many of the most important American independent films of the past decade (among them “Safe” and “The Brothers McMullen”), including four of the past ten Grand Prize winners at the Sundance Film Festival. He is also a widely published film historian and theorist. He was recently named a Nuveen Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and was a University Lecturer at Columbia.
“COLUMBIA ON THE CUTTING EDGE: INVENTIONS OLD AND NEW” WITH MORT FRIEDMAN, DIMITRIS ANASTASSIOU, AND JAMES IM
23 October 2003
As a researcher, teacher, and administrator at Columbia for over half a century, Dean Mort Friedman has earned the de facto title of “oral historian” of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He introduced two faculty-inventors as prominent actors in the new chapter of Columbia’s rich history of scientific inventions. This interactive panel introduced the audience – in lay terms – to the excitement of discoveries and inventions; to the translation of these scientific and technological inventions to the borderless world of business; and to the necessary awareness of ethical responsibility. Dr. Anastassiou discussed his previous research on multimedia technology, including his participation in the MPEG-2 standardization effort. He also talked about his new research, which is motivated by the vision, recently formulated by several experts, that the biology and medicine of the future will be largely information sciences. Professor Im discussed leveraging the outcome of scientific and fundamental research carried out in academia in order to create and/or address opportunities that can lead to technological advances. As an example, Professor Im highlighted how simple studies on the melting and solidification of materials have enabled his research group to develop advanced methods for making better electronic devices and products.
Morton Friedman received his B.S. and M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from New York University, where he earned as well his Doctorate in Engineering Science. Since 1956, however, Columbia became his academic and professional home. Here he taught Civil Engineering, served as Chairman of the Division of Mathematical Methods, as Professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the University Senate, Associate Dean for Instruction and Research, Chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and, since 1995, Vice Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
His principal research contracts include the NSF Curriculum Award, the NSF Gateway Engineering Education Coalition, DARPA Large-Scale Computations, NASA SST/Sonic Boom, and NSF Variational Methods for Fluids. His awards include the Great Teachers Award ( Columbia University), a Fulbright to Europe as a lecturer in Applied Mathematics, and the Field Instrumentation Scholar (American Institute for Physics).
Dimitris Anastassiou received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979. From 1979 to 1983 he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Since 1983, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering of Columbia University where he is currently Professor and Director of Columbia's Genomic Information Systems Laboratory. He is an IEEE Fellow, the recipient of an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and a Columbia University Great Teacher Award. His previous research interests have been in the area of digital signal processing and information theory with emphasis on the digital representation of multimedia signals, with contributions to the international digital television coding standard, MPEG-2. He is the founder and previous Director of Columbia University's Image and Advanced Television Laboratory. His research is now exclusively focused on using his expertise in engineering to the emerging field of computational biology.
James S. Im is a full professor of Materials Science in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, and he is the inventor of a laser crystallization technology called Sequential Lateral Solidification (SLS). He received his PhD degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) prior to joining Columbia in 1991. He has worked in various research capacities at GE Corporate R&D Center, MIT Lincoln Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Philips Research Laboratories, and Samsung Electronics Corporation. His research activities include investigations of discontinuous phase transitions in condensed systems and excimer-laser crystallization of thin silicon films for thin-film transistor devices.
“THE NEED FOR RECOGNITION” WITH ARTHUR LAURENTS
19 November 2003
Why is it that celebrities strive excessively hard for recognition? When they do get it they don their dark glasses and behave as if they wish they never had gained it. Recognition is an essential aspect of our culture and plays an important role in the decisions we make. It can drive us to success, or it can lead to destruction. The human need for recognition is as essential as the need to be happy. Many of us have a pathological need for recognition. As dangerous as the need for recognition can be, lack of recognition can be every bit as devastating. Mr. Laurents examined “The Need for Recognition” and revealed the significance of it in his writing and the role it played in his life and long career. Recognition, for Mr. Laurents, is what every child wants from a parent.
Arthur Laurents , who was born in Brooklyn and educated at Cornell University, served in the U. S. Army from 1941 to 1945. He has committed over six decades to writing, and has distinguished himself writing for radio, theatre, and film. Among his many plays are “Home of the Brave,” “Time of the Cuckoo,” “A Clearing in the Woods” “Invitation to a March,” “The Enclave,” “Jolson Sings Again,” “My Good Name,” “Claudia Lazio,” “The Vibrator,” Closing Bell” and “2 Lives,” which opened at Lincoln Center in November of 2003. Among his more famous works are the books for West Side Story and Gypsy, which many critics consider to be among the best musicals ever produced.
Among his many screenplays are “Rope,” “The Snake Pit,” “Caught,” “Anastasia,” “Bonjour Tristesse,” “The Way We Were” and “The Turning Point.” Beyond writing for the stage, Laurents directed his own plays and plays of others on Broadway and Off Broadway, including, among others, “La Cage aux Folles,” “I Can Get It For You Wholesale,” “Invitation to a March.” He has written two novels, The Way We Were and The Turning Point. His memoir, Original Story By: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood, received excellent reviews. Laurents, who has been honored with many awards and who has worked with many of the theatre and movie legends of the twentieth century, was elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in 1983.
“RIGHTS ON TRIAL: ONE MAN’S STRUGGLE TO DO JUSTICE” WITH ARTHUR KINOY AND JEFFREY FOGEL
3 December 2003
In a career spanning fifty years as a pioneering civil rights attorney, Columbia Law graduate Arthur Kinoy left his mark on nearly every landmark decision of the twentieth century. Sadly, Arthur Kinoy passed away unexpectedly a couple of months before giving the talk. Jeffrey Fogel led a discussion and prospectus of Kinoy’s contribution to civil rights. This evening’s event began with a short film, “Doing Justice: The Life & Trials of Arthur Kinoy,” followed by a discussion of the challenges and successes that marked Kinoy’s career – from the era of McCarthyism to the civil rights era, Watergate and the Steelworkers. This biographical film has been hailed as a celebration of “one man’s courage in demanding that America live up to its Constitutional commitment to equal justice for all. A model of how one person can make a difference” (William Chafe, Duke University).
Arthur Kinoy held the position of distinguished Professor of Law, Emeritus, Rutgers University School of Law. He taught Constitutional Law, the Law of the First Amendment and the Law of Civil Rights. He also founded and co-chaired the Board of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He authored of Rights on Trial: The Odyssey of a People’s Lawyer. He graduated from Harvard College and received his LL.B. from Columbia Law School and was admitted to the New York Bar.
In the 1950s Arthur Kinoy was Associate General Counsel of the United Electrical Workers and then in private practice represented many witnesses before the McCarthy Committee and the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was one of the appellate counsel for Morton Sobell in the celebrated Sobell-Rosenberg case. In the 1960s he was one of the lawyers for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He successfully briefed and argued the case of Dombrowski v. Pfister in 1965 in the United States Supreme Court – a case now recognized as one of the landmark decisions of the First Amendment. In a subsequent case he presented to the Supreme Court, Dombrowski v. Senator Eastland, the proposition was established that the counsel of the Senate Internal Security Committee was not immune from suits for violations of the civil rights of citizens. In 1966 he obtained the first federal injunction in history against the House Un-American Activities Committee while representing student anti-war leaders. Rep. Joseph Pool of Texas, the Acting Chair, ordered Kinoy physically removed from the Committee room by federal marshals, and arrested for attempting to engage in legal argument with the Committee. Kinoy was subsequently vindicated by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
In 1969, together with Professor Herbert Reid of Howard Law School, Arthur Kinoy successfully argued the case of Powell v. McCormack in which the Supreme Court, in the last opinion of Chief Justice Warren, held unconstitutional the exclusion of Rep. Adam Clayton Powell from the House of Representatives. Arthur Kinoy was chief appellate counsel in the appeals of the Chicago Seven defendants from their convictions under the Federal Anti-Riot Statute. The appeals were successful and the convictions were reversed by the Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit, in November 1972. On February 24, 1972 Arthur Kinoy argued before the Supreme Court the case of United States v. United States District Court, contesting the Nixon’s Administration’s claim to the right to engage in wholesale warrant-less wiretapping against domestic political organizations. The argument was successful and in a unanimous opinion written by Mr. Justice Powell in June 1972, the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon Administration’s claim of “inherent power” for the President.
Arthur Kinoy appeared before the House Interior Committee of the House of Representatives in 1976 presenting testimony in support of the right of the Puerto Rican government to self-determination. He brought this struggle before an International forum when in 1977 he appeared before the United Nations Subcommittee on De-colonization presenting testimony on the right of the Puerto Rican nation to self-determination. In June of 1980, Arthur Kinoy argued before the United States Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit, on behalf of the Steelworkers of Youngstown, Ohio in their lawsuit to stop plant closings by the U.S. Steel Company. In December of 1981 Arthur Kinoy testified before Senator John Conyers’ Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee of the causes of racially motivated violence and the availability of federal remedies to meet the rising tide of this type of violence.
Jeffrey Fogel , Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and former clinical professor at Rutgers School of Law, has practiced and taught civil rights and civil liberties law for more than thirty years. He has served as the litigation director of the Prisoner’s Rights Project of the ACLU of New Jersey and later as the Executive and Legal Director of the ACLU of New Jersey. Mr. Fogel has also worked for the National Lawyers Guild as a staff attorney in its Puerto Rico Legal Project (now the Puerto Rico Institute for Civil Rights) and served as a national vice president and president of its New York City Chapter.
“THE LANGUAGE POLICE AND I” WITH DIANE RAVITCH
3 February 2004
Diane Ravitch’s book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, explores the efforts of the right- and left-wing activists to censor textbooks, removing anything that might upset or offend, and hindering efforts for an honest and full education.
To what exactly do the censors object? A typical publisher’s guideline advises that:
Women cannot be depicted as caregivers or performers of household chores.
Men cannot be lawyers, doctors or plumbers. They must be nurturing helpmates.
Old people cannot be feeble or dependent; they must jog or repair the roof.
A story that is set in the mountains discriminates against students from flatlands.
Cake cannot appear in a story because it is not nutritious.
Diane Ravitch spoke autobiographically about her entrance into her career as a "public intellectual,” her educational and professional path, and her exploration of textbook censorship.
Dr. Ravitch is a Research Professor of Education at New York University. She holds the Brown Chair in Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where she is a Senior Fellow and edits the Brookings Papers on Education Policy. She is a member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution. Dr. Ravitch is a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, to which she was appointed by Secretary of Education Riley in 1997 and reappointed in 2001. From 1991 to 1993, she was Assistant Secretary of Education responsible for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education.
Before entering government service, Dr. Ravitch was Adjunct Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has written eight books, including Left Back (2000); The Troubled Crusade (1983); and The Great School Wars (1974). She has edited fourteen books and written nearly 400 articles and reviews for scholarly and popular publications. Her books and articles have been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Polish, Arabic, Spanish, Swedish, and Japanese. Dr. Ravitch is a member of the National Academy of Education (1979), the Society of American Historians (1984), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), and PEN International. A native of Texas, Diane Ravitch is a graduate of the Houston public schools. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College in 1960 and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1975.
“ENDING EXTREME POVERTY” WITH JEFFREY SACHS
2 March 2004
On September 24, 2003, Jeffrey Sachs spoke at the Hilton Foundation Conference in New York City. An excerpt:
“As the director for the Millennium Project for the UN Secretary General, I’ve been asked to strategize on how to address problems of global poverty, focusing on the crises that intersect extreme poverty like malaria, TB, AIDS, the problems of hunger, micro-nutrient deficiencies, soil nutrient depletion, half a million mothers dying in childbirth because they lack access to health care, multiple forms of environmental degradation, etc. As horrendous and as widespread as these problems are, they are actually manageable, if you dare to look them in the eye...
“[T]he more you study what can be done and what can’t be done, how to do it and where to put the priorities, the more you realize something absolutely shocking: we’ve arrived at a situation today where we are truly so rich that if we ever really made a serious effort to address these problems, not only could we tremendously improve the state of the world, but actually it is not crazy for us to think about having within our power, uniquely for the first time in the history of the world, the chance to end extreme poverty within a generation.”
Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on a group of poverty alleviation initiatives called the Millennium Development Goals. Prior to joining Columbia, Sachs spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. Sachs became internationally known in the 1980s for his work advising governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa on economic reforms. He is author or co-author of more than two hundred scholarly articles, and has written and edited many books. Sachs was recently elected into the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University.
“WHAT SHOULD COLUMBIA SCHOLARS DO WITH THEIR LIVES?” WITH NICHOLAS LEMANN
31 March 2004
Nicholas Lemann was born, raised and educated in New Orleans. He began his journalism career there as a 17 year-old writer for an alternative weekly newspaper, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American History and Literature and was President of the Harvard Crimson. After graduation, he worked at The Washington Monthly, as an associate editor and then managing editor; at Texas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; at The Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; at The Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and at the New Yorker, as staff writer and then Washington Correspondent. On September 1, 2003, he became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. His selection marked the end of a process of reexamination of the school's mission conducted by a national task force convened by the university's President, Lee Bollinger.
Lemann has published four books, most recently The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes; and The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT. He is now at work on a book about the Reconstruction period in American history. Lemann has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Slate, and American Heritage; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., Frontline, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities. He serves on the boards of directors of the Authors Guild, the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the Society of American Historians, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He lives in Pelham, New York, with his wife, Judith Shulevitz, a critic and author, and four children.
“IN SEARCH OF THE PRIVATE INTELLECTUAL” WITH MICHAEL ANDERSON
20 April 2004
What exactly is a “public intellectual?” Is there an alternative – a model of a private intellectual? And why does any of this matter? Michael Anderson explored the history of the intellectual in American public life during the 20th century and what part the role will play in 21st century.
Michael Jon Anderson was born in Chicago, Ill., on September 13, 1952, and attended public schools there. He was student at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1970 to 1975, receiving his Bachelor of Science in journalism in 1974 and his Master of Science in journalism in 1975. While at Northwestern he was a staff member on the student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, for three years, serving as editor-in-chief during his senior year. He was awarded his graduate degree cum laude, was inducted into Kappa Tau Alpha, the journalism honorary society, and received the Harrington Award as outstanding graduate student. In 1997, he was one of the inaugural inductees into Medill’s Hall of Achievement.
Anderson joined the staff of The Chicago Sun-Times upon graduation in June 1975 and worked there until June 1982. During his tenure at the newspaper he was a general assignment reporter, education writer, financial writer and financial news editor. In 1978, he received the Jacob Scher Award for investigative reporting, presented by the Chicago chapter of Women in Communication, for a series on child welfare services in Illinois. In 1982, Anderson joined the graduate division of Medill as an assistant professor, following a year of adjunct teaching. He taught the Urban Reporting of Public Affairs course.
In 1984, Anderson worked for The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, where his second assignment was coverage of the largest mass murder in American history, the story of James Huberty, who killed 22 people after seizing a McDonald’s restaurant in San Diego. Anderson then moved to The Los Angeles Times, where he worked on their electronic publishing prototype, on the financial copy desk, the suburban copy desk and as suburban sports news editor. Anderson joined The Book Review of The New York Times in 1988 and is working there currently. In this position, he selects books for review, solicits reviewers, edits reviews and aids in production. Among the writers he has worked with are Robert Pinsky, Edna O’Brien, John Le Carré and John Irving. He currently is writing the first biography of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote “A Raisin in the Sun.” Anderson is a fellow of Calhoun College at Yale University, where he teaches a seminar on literary criticism.
“AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND THE AGE OF GENOCIDE” WITH SAMANTHA POWER
29 April 2004
Samantha Power has recently published A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and National Book Critics Circle Award. A Problem from Hell is a scholarly analysis of America’s policy towards genocide in the 20th century, asking the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow “never again” repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington’s top policy makers, newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power traces the United States’ policy toward genocide: the Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians in 1915, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds, the ethnic cleansings of Yugoslavia and the Hutus’ genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. In addition to an examination of the policies which allowed these massacres to continue unabated, Ms. Power’s work also traces the historical origins of the idea of genocide and offers many stories of the individuals who fought valiantly – if unsuccessfully – for American intervention.
Samantha Power is the Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Power moved to the United States from her native Ireland in 1979, and she attended Yale University and Harvard Law School. She was a journalist for US News, World Report and The Economist, for whom she covered the war in Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996. In 1996 she joined the International Crisis Group (ICG) as a political analyst, helping launch the organization in Bosnia. Her article on the Rwandan genocide, “Bystanders to Genocide,” appeared in the September 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Samantha Power also edited, with Graham Allison, Realizing Human Rights.